Language in a Cultural Context

1. Language in a Cultural Context Ganga or Gayle: Who Will Lead the Windies

2. Questions to ask yourself… • 1. what are the main points of the article? • 2. Are there ideas or concepts that are difficult for you to understand? • 3. Do you know the sport being played? The particular sporting terms? • 4. Regardless of the sport or your knowledge of the sport, do you understand the main concepts? • 5. For whom is this article written?

3. 6. Are there nuances that this particular audience would understand that you wouldn’t? • 7. are there particular words or terms you don’t understand? How could some of these have significance on the intended audience? • 8. Do you think this is an important issue? Is the issue important to the audience? Why do you think so?

4. Last round… • 9. Did individual words or terms make it difficult for you to understand this article? What were these words? Were they all related to cricket? • 10. were there references in the article you didn’t understand? Were they related to cricket? A particular nation? A team? Particular people? • 11. now consider what aspects of your own background and language use may have made this article either relevant and interesting or perhaps foreign and confusing: nationality, personal interest/hobbies, race, gender, class, etc.

5. Now… • In groups of 3 think of a topic that may be foreign to most of the students in the class. • Write a dialogue that consists of terminology, phrases, wording to a particular topic • We will share as a class and discuss language and how some of our cultural background may make it difficult to understand a topic.

6. Topics for next year… • Part 3 • Language and power (linguistic imperialism, propaganda) • Gender (inequality, constructions of masculinity and femininity) • Language and social relations (social and professional status, race) • Language and taboo (swearing, political correctness) • Language and knowledge (science and technology, argot and jargon)

7. Your Homework for Summer • Language & Literature SL2 & HL2 • Holiday Task! • You will be starting your 12th grade year with Part 3 of the Language and Literature course. This section is Language in Cultural Context. • To prepare for this you must come to the first class with three texts that identify text type, purpose and language for one of the following themes. They must be three different text types. • Example text types: • Newspaper articles, cartoons, blog postings, advertisements, youtube videos, fiction, poetry and virtually any other text type. However, there is no limitation on the text types you bring in as long as they are of three different text types and one includes a visual. • You must cite your sources.

8. Themes • Themes • Language and power (linguistic imperialism, propaganda) • Gender (inequality, constructions of masculinity and femininity) • Language and social relations (social and professional status, race) • Language and taboo (swearing, political correctness) • Language and knowledge (science and technology, argot and jargon)

9. Not an option… • You cannot use material covered in the first year of the course. • These texts will be used as the basis for an assessed further oral activity (FOA) in the first week of school. • An example (that you cannot use because it was a part of the Mass Communication unit) might be an advertisement for a beer product that uses sexist language. It might show that men have to be tough, ‘manly’ types and that women are shown as young, scantily dressed and ‘sexy’. You might argue that the ad is ‘constructing’ an idea about what it is to be a man and a woman. You might also have an opinion column on the same subject and a cartoon that highlights these differences in gender.